George Edward Woodberry Quotes

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Symbols are important.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

Words are the small change of thought.

Words, which are the dress of thoughts, deserve surely more care than clothes, which are only the dress of the person.

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

One of the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

To make sense to us as physical creatures, any 'truth' must undergo transformations, be couched in certain terms or we couldn't understand it.